Foojay Podcast #48: JUG Oberpfalz, JCON Conference, and JAVAPRO Magazine

Transcript

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[0:00] Hello and welcome in this new episode of the Foojay podcast last month we visited the JS in Switzerland and now we are on the other side of the Border in Germany welcome to the Foojay podcast all your news about OpenJDK once a month in this podcast we talk about the history of a yava user group and the people behind it in this episode we are in obber fals in Germany for a special reason the organizers of the local Jer are the same people responsible for the jcon conference in a few weeks in Cologne let’s learn more about the Java community in Germany hello my name is Marcus K I’m the CEO and co-founder of micro stream we run various open source projects like Eclipse store and I’m very active in the Java Community or try to be active in the ja Community organizing Jon conference we with started some years ago with a printed Java magazine in Germany we continue now the online edition so we invite all speakers and editors to join us to write articles for jav proo magazine the English version now and with my team I work with I work on Java projects for almost 20 years now

[1:29] Hey my name is Rich I’m working at XF software where we build tools for Java developers for over 20 years for example rapid Clips which is a rapid application development tool for Java which gives you a UI Builder that is what you see is what you get for web apps and together with some very enthusiastic people I around the Java User Group in obals and also organize jcon Europe in Cologne and I’m Frank Lort the producer of this Foojay podcast and Java developer and technical writer and a very curious person related to everything which is happening in the Java World before we jve dive into Java and the ju what should I know about Ober fals where are we in Germany yeah in the Southeast so in Bavaria but in the northern of Bavaria but southeast of Germany right to the border of the Czech Republic so it’s a beautiful landscape this is not my so this is not the real background I use here but everything is so we have a lot of mountains and it’s it’s really green and mostly it’s rainy rainy and cloudy but it’s great for cloud computing stuff and I live in Belgium so I know

[2:48] What that feels like so you’re both very active in Java with your company also yourself what’s your history in Java okay yeah I started a little bit late with Java because I was in the early 2000s I was M more productive with PHP and Visual Basic and what I always liked with Visual Basic was the what you see is what you get you I Builder this was super prominent feature for me and when I started working with XF when we were building the exive IDE with what you see is what you get u i Builder this really spoke to me and this really opened up Java and so I started to work with Java building idees getting deep into the tech and yes and that stuck with me I’m still with Java Marcus I started programming with kodori 64 and I also were was really late in Java and it was in the year 1999 so when we worked on a web design tool and together with a friend of mine and he said hey let’s let’s do it in Javas so because this is the most modern programming language and this is the future and I would choose Java I said

[4:21] Okay why not and then so my opinion was Java for me it felt a little bit complicated and I and other people also said oh Java there’s a high learning cor so our second idea was to build a Java development environment that works like Visual Basic but creates a Java program so visual today we call it low code or no code development environment 20 years ago we talked about 4gl then we talked about rapid development so this was my starting point with Java and since since 20 years we are now developing tools for developers or database programming Java by the way welcome to the club of the people who started with the commodor 64 awesome an awesome machine yeah it was also my introduction to into programming so I think we’re about the same age without mention the bird here now about the Jing over Falls were you both involved from the start or did you get involved into into the organization yes we founded it and actually we were sitting in the Silicon Valley Marcus do you remember the name of the cafe where we where

[5:50] We said it’s a it’s a famous cafe we traveled to Silicon Valley and this was when elos musk was not that controversial like this a few years back and we were sitting in the cafe where you made this PayPal deal and yeah and there we talked about starting a J in Uber faults and yes and we wrote it down on a napkin of course because you have to do that right so yes I still have the napkin and that’s how many years ago I can’t remember the year when this must be 2016 15 something like that right actually I’m not really involved in Java User Group over so actually this is more Richard part so I I’m very active in the Jon organization and Java Pro magazine but Java User Group overs Richard is the captain but you’re one of those JS which is more than just a ju that’s clear try to do what we can so it it’s it’s great to organize events and especially events for job developers and to try something new out new ideas what can we improve so this is also what we tried for this Jon Edition this year to try something

[7:15] Different that is unique so to provide Java Community value and yeah some something new MH how big can you estimate how big the Java communities in Germany like how many JS are there over complete of Germany any idea I had to look this up because of course Germany is very German about all things there is a like a central organization called the U in Germany which bundles a lot of the ja resources not all of them but most I’d say and they have close to 40 JS organized within the I mhm your jug how regular do you have events is it a monthly thing or just when you have a speaker available how do you what is your schedule so we tried to do it every month and we coordinate with other meetups in the widen overalls area because there are other meetups that share some of the people that attend the meetings and so we try to coordinate on that and we usually do it once a month and we are very happy that we have a very U steady attendance and we also have the great fortune that through jcon of course we are quite famous and so we get a lot of great

[8:34] Speakers that travel to overfalls for example mati tonan from vardin was traveling just for a jack meet up from Finland to us which was really great and we had a lot of fun and okay also we hosted The Jug at that time in the brewery so this might be part of the motivation but you never know yeah combination of business and pleasure absolutely that’s how they call it so it’s not always at the same venue you have different locations for the J correct yeah that’s correct yeah but you I think you prefer the brewery we do we use it when we can yeah and so you mentioned jcon a few times what I find a bit strange is you are organizing Jon but I just checked Google Maps and it’s about 4 and a half hour drive away from Uber Falls if you have a very fast car okay then why so far away from where you have are having your J when we started out looking for locations we had a lot of restrictions we wanted to have a cinema so that we can do live coding because we had events at other places that were wonderful we had conferences at for example a luftansa place where they train pilots and

[9:59] Everything but it was they had beautiful meeting rooms and everything but they had really small screens and like the projectors they were super weak and we always wanted to see live coding and that’s just the best in a cinema because if you have a PowerPoint presentation that’s okay with a small screen but if you want to show code and how you work you have to you have to change your workflow for some conferences because you have to zoom in so much and that’s not how we work most people that I know work not with one screen but with two or with one really big screen and you want to replicate that because I think this is also one thing you can learn from other people in programming how they use their IDE how they use their tools and that’s kind of alienated if you have such a small screen so this was one of big big factors to find the location and of course we wanted to have that in Bavaria because it’s it’s beautiful here yeah but we couldn’t find a Cinema that had all the things we need because there’s a lot of things like you need Hotel space then infrastructure

[11:10] Train connections airport connections then you need of course Wi-Fi Wi-Fi in a cinema this is killing you because the cinema rooms the theaters they are usually pretty shielded and you have no you have no cell phone reception so you can’t even have a hotspot in there you need a cinema that has that or you have to bring it with you and install it in the cinema and that is super expensive so we were looking for a place that had a good Wi-Fi and then of course then you have a cinema that has Wi-Fi and then they tell you oh we have 25 megabits of internet connection coming into this Cinema and I’m like how can you live okay but different people different things you know and I could go on but I think these are the more entertaining parts of the story what I learned from Stefan who’s organizing devox in Belgium he grew his event because yeah it’s already 20 years so he grew together with the cinema and I think he paid actually for the fiber connection to the cinema to have a stable internet connection so yeah indeed it’s probably one of the biggest issues sounds very

[12:22] Familiar and I have to say I was lucky enough to speak at a few of these conferences in cinemas like Dev and in Netherlands and jall as a speaker it’s really impressive to see your code or your example or even yourself on that big screen and the fun thing is I did film school so I’m actually a film editor and the only thing I ever got into a cinema was my coding work nice so that’s a nice coincidence what I also find remarkable about the jcon conference is that you’re giving away a lot of tickets for free for people who are member of a Juck now I see I’ve seen that a three three-day ticket costs €800 Euro so and you’re giving away 1,000 tickets for free correct the idea was we started the Java Pro magazine as a free printed magazine what is also unique so they so in Germany the we have a very strong magazine or market for magazine Ines in general and there is there are some printed magazines so Java magazines but they all cost money of course and the prices are increasing and so and so as a as a programmer and you have everything in Internet

[13:50] Available so you ask yourself should I pay € 10 for this copy just for one or two new information I can also find in Internet so and but on the other hand we in our perspective it’s super important as a job developer to learn new news new stuff to read articles from experienced developers or editors so why not producing a printed magazine and providing the magazine for free I mean it’s the same with open source software mhm so we also so and our competitors so I don’t say are competitors actually but they asked us how can you do that so you provide them a printed magazine I mean it costs money how can you do that yeah I mean it’s the same with open source software how can we produce high quality software and give it for free how does it work so this the same concept so it can Pro provide everything for free actually actually with this open-source software principle so and so we started to produce the magazine for free and it worked so we it was financed by our strong Partners they get advertising

[15:19] Visibility and then of course the idea was now to organize a conference and let’s let’s let let us be the very first conference that provides tickets for free for the Java user groups because everybody says hey we are a community conference for the community by the community pay us $800 or $1,200 for three days this is for business customers this is okay but it’s not community so we found a way to Finance this and provide all Java user group members the same content the same speakers you have at all these conference on the tour International for free and so this is our I mean this is our part what we can give back to the job community and I think this is great because it’s Unique and more CH us members should come to jcon and join us but if you mention free software that’s because some people who have too much time or Reserve time put their effort in there no while a magazine and an event like like yours and Jon and other conference they really cost money you have the location you have catering you have so I guess

[16:55] You have some some good sponsors and partners who are with willing to pay for all this well yes of course so the if you have the exhibitors with all these exhibitors paying you a lot of money you can Finance the conference so this is possible and our goal was not to make money to care for our Revenue so this was not our main goal this is not important for us mhm and this is the reason why it is possible if if I had to earn a lot of money with the conference then it’s different then it is not possible and it’s also with open source software you mentioned that it’s written by people who have a lot of time but I think it’s not so most successful open source projects are super professional MH and they have to be professional otherwise you have not you have no chance in a community to be used in professional enterprise software products so it also has to be professional and open- Source software is a business model in my perspective yeah yeah you have to find a way how to finance it and it’s the same it’s the same with a conference and this

[18:25] Is off topic but I believe this would also work with other products and for instance with food or anything else mhm the same principle yeah yeah yeah we talked about this earning money from an open source project earlier in the podcast and a lot of these project are really struggling with finding a business model around around the project but yeah if people can get inspired by this conference that would be great if they find a way to Really make a profit from an open source project for instance or from another event that would be a good good result so J Java Pro the magazine is also something you organize it’s not a company it’s really a team effort again or how should I look at it there is a company behind because of we have expenses we have to people and we organize an event so there is a company behind but and it’s it’s not a nonprofit organization it’s really a normal company but the concept was to provide the magazine for free and through covid it was really challenging for us so we stopped producing the printed magazine and now we will relaunch the online

[19:47] Version and we relaunch it as a international online magazines which means the whole content will be now from now on in English Lang anguage of course we will keep the German version but the focus is now on International content provided for international Java developers and how can people contribute content or do you have a fixed set of authors this is very easy so you who people are interested in contributing can register on our website they can register to become a Java Pro editor and then you will get access so we will have a look on what you have contributed already so we have a lot of speakers and editors in our database so we know the people already but even if you new to the Java Pro Community we will check what you have contributed so far and then you will Ex become accepted and then you can decide what content you want to contribute how often there are no rules so there are no restrictions you’re free to contribute you have to be the owner of the copyright of course and then you can write an

[21:22] Article for once in a year or you can write an article every single week it’s on you so it’s a bit the same that we try to do with Foojay is attracting more people yes people who have already written content maybe for their own block and are looking for a way to reach more people and that’s maybe something they can do through Foojay through Java Pro great good so the conference we mentioned it is it a big event how many tracks are there at the same time how many speakers do you have can you give some more insights in the conference we have four tracks this year in four Cinemas the day before the conference we have a workshop day where we rented out some space in the building next to the cinema this is a shared office space with really nice rooms and a really nice view and the whole conference is located in a carfree zone so something for Europeans very very usual but for people from other parts of the world especially from the US not so usual so everything is very walkable behind the cinema and behind the building that we use for the workshops there’s a big

[22:39] Big Park so you’re out in the green we have a lot of restaurants around and in the cinema that we use for catering this is something special also about jcon we have really good food so you can choose where you want to eat and we have a Indian place we have a German place we have a burger place we have a Italian place we have a to house place so this is something that we want to embrace you can have a good time of course in the cinema listening to technical content but then we also want to highlight it the connection between people is very important and if you like food like most of people do you can have good connections while having good food and there is of course seating which is not available at all conferences but you can go to such a restaurant you get a lunch voucher from the conference you can go to the restaurant and eat there with friends have a nice time and we have requested good weather so it will be nice weather outside so you can also sit outside because May in Germany can be very very nice so not too hot not too cold just a good

[23:54] Atmosphere for having good conversations so and I see it’s four days but it’s actually one- day workshops and three-day conference correct yes that’s correct and it’s from the 13th of May to the 16th of May and 13th is the Monday where it’s the workshops and then the other three days are regular conference days okay and we will be there with Foojay we will have a live podcast the same thing we did at jall so if everyone who is listening to this podcast and has something that he wants to share about Java or the Java ecosystem or all the languages around it you can find us somewhere in the venue on the Tuesday and we will have some interviews there live interviews we will live stream them and then collect them again in one or more podcast we’ll see how many people end up at the microphone to be interviewed I’m very interested I’m very looking forward to it to have again chats with people from the Java Community not only the speakers but also the users and people who come to the conference to learn because yeah that’s the main goal of a conference is learn new things if we go back to

[25:05] The ju do you have one or more sessions that were really remarkable because they were either really good or really bad something went wrong for instance or you had too much people and could not fit in the room something like that we usually have a really good feeling about how many people will show up but we had a really interesting and diverse session a few weeks ago we had a session that was called how to start with Java in the year 2024 and the audience was very different to what we usually see usually we have some regulars some people that show up from time to time but this time we almost only had new people because we did something last year with Adam bean and we had a job haters meet up so where people could hate on Java and then we said okay we listen to the hate and then it was mostly C and Python and other language guys and girls that hat it and so it was very nice and we had fun but then we had the idea to do something to show them that Java has has really involved in the last 20 years because people have that 20 years ago

[26:27] Java in their minds and so we did that session where we showed new things like you can run Java from the command line without compiling or you don’t have to write public static vo Main and public class and all that anymore and how Frameworks like quarkus or spring boot are so easy that everybody that can program in some kind of language can understand what is basically happening here and people were amazed about how cool Java these days is and I think we will have more of them we already discussing that we should have more sessions at jcon next year we always have beginner sessions and we always have beginner sessions but maybe we should have a bigger focus on that and we were just amazed about this feedback from people that were not in the Java space but can be I think that most people who hate Java actually hate Java 8 or older they probably missed what all happened in Java in the most recent years with this fast evolvement and many releases is that a bit the same feeling you have that Java is it’s not evolving very fast but it is

[27:47] Evolving stable let’s call it like that it builds up on a good foundation and it keeps that Foundation being stable do you think Java is langage for the future absolutely so in my opinion is the best so when I talk to people about Java and they ask me about that I have two big things that I want to bring into this conversation one is there there’s no other language that I know of that has so many big companies and such a good Community behind it you have Java from IBM from Oracle from sap you have builds also from Microsoft which run extensively in their Cloud there is so much companies that are involved in Java that’s just great and that gives a lot of like job security I’d say and then the other thing is all the cool Innovation that is happening not only to like language features that you describe from Java atent on but also things like grow VM crack snap start instant on all these features that make Java technology so amazing the jbm so amazing and I can’t see a better time to be or start with Java because it’s it’s so stable as you said and at

[29:09] The same time it’s so Innovative so I don’t know what language has that MH I absolutely agree with Richard so we see that all applications that get bigger and bigger will be one day written in Java so everything that runs on a server Enterprise applications CH was dominating the Enterprise application market and this will I see this for the future as well currently we see that python is growing rapidly it’s because of the AI hype and this is why so the data analysts they were used to use python from the beginning now the data analysts are now the guys buil the machine learning stuff so this the reason why this I think I believe this the reason why the number one language for AI currently is python and it’s it’s it’s growing rapidly it will be interesting to see how cha will involved in AI so because we as a company of working on a vector database already so based on the eclipse store open source project we run and so we also wondering will Java one day dominating the AI Market as well so it will be interesting

[30:58] I believe python will be strong for many years because of yeah I mentioned the data analysts are working with python from the beginning so they will use python it will be interesting to see what happens if a an AI application grows more and more it becomes a huge AI or machine learning application will Java be yeah able to cover this Market this piece of Market Market I believe in it yeah the previous podcast we talked about Ai and machine learning with Java so we have Lang chain for J and other projects so there are also Evolutions ongoing in Java with new jeets and new new projects to improve Java for machine learning related use cases are there many AI talks at jcon we try to limit the AI talks to as much as we can let let’s let’s put it that way of course there will be AI talks but and there were a lot of AI talks submitted to jcon but we still wanted Jon to be a conference that is about Java programming we have an aspect of AI but the core should be about core Java and development practices and I think that is what people coming to the conference are looking

[32:19] For I heard a few comments about AI at conferences that the message is your job will become obsolete so why should to even give that kind of talk at a conference so but yeah I think the conclusion was programmers will not get obsolete by by AI luckily or definitely not in the short term do you have any questions towards our listeners how they can get involved into jcon in Java Pro in your J What really interests me is what people want to see at Community conferences we always open for input and that is not only content wise but also would you like to see different things different formats we are not a corporate conference we can do crazy stuff and we do that and we try new things for example this year we try one to one meetings where you can book a meeting with a speaker if you have a topic that is not public or you are just not comfortable asking that in front of other people so you can make the most of jcon with a onetoone meeting for example and we every year we try out things and see if they work and we are really look we are

[33:46] Really eager to get input on what to try next or what could be a good thing for a conference that us know MH to have the chance to book a meeting with a speaker this is a new feature we try out at Jon and I always had a problem at other conferences when I heard a great speaker a great talk had a lot lot of questions but it was almost impossible to get in contact with the speaker because of after the session yeah of course they have to leave the room and then there are a lot of people want to talk to the speaker and then the speaker wants to have a break and I want to have a coer and then many speakers leaving the conference after their talk unfortunately so why not giving the chance for participants to book a onetoone meeting for just 50 minutes to meet their favorite speakers talk about what they have learned in a talk or individual questions for their project to get hints by the speaker for me this is super valuable this would be great so this is why we I try it out this year so at Jon everybody has access to an app where you can

[35:15] Find all the speakers and can you can book a meeting onsite and we have tables or number tables and can meet at these number tables and start a conversation and to get more value from the conference from a speech not only see the speaker on a stage and I would like to know if this is interesting for Java developers or participants attending a conference and this is the first time you do this yes so we saw it on at wer Capital conferences investment conference this is very common to get in contact with investors so why not trying this out with speakers from a job Community because they’re so attendees are sometimes a little bit shy so if there are a lot of people talking to the speaker they don’t want to interrupt but speakers on the other hand they are they like it so they like to be ask hey if they questions about your talk it shows okay my talk was interesting thank you this is a great opportunity to get in contact with a speaker and on the other hand speaker can get in contact with potential customers also

[36:38] Because many speakers are Consultants freelancer or working for organizations who build the product behind open source project and so they get important feedback and it’s also for networking and for yeah for getting contact with new potential customers I really like the ID I sometimes struggle with something I’m experimenting with a new tool or and you don’t find the real good use how to configure something like this weekend I was struggling with a pet project and then Almas Bim from the fic yel Library he just said yeah get let’s get in on a call and in five minutes my problem was solved because yeah you’re doing this wrong exactly this line is wrong and my problem was solved most of the people in Java Community are very reachable you can ask them questions through mail through through slack through through through Twitter if they are still there but really being able to talk to someone in person I think this is really a great idea I’m looking forward how this will turn out at the conference yeah Frank you can book a meeting with me okay are you available still on the

[37:51] Tuesday I’m there absolutely let’s go for a burger yeah definitely have to use all these coupons that you’re saying that will be available okay then I’m looking forward to meeting you in person in Colon I’m always saying at the French way in colog I’m looking forward to what we will be doing with the Foojay podcast and doing the live interviews and I hope to have some time to even visit a few of the sessions at the same time thank you for your time for joining this recording thank you for organizing the Jer of course thank you also to the listeners of this episode keep an eye on Foojay for future articles about development and everything related to the Java World thanks a lot give me a food give me a j give me the friends of OpenJDK